I was severely watched, and not allowed much freedom. We had less restrictions in some ways, and some officers were actually allowed to fish. Most of us took to making rods and lines and flies. General Smith, easily the best fisherman there, made most beautiful flies, some of which he gave me.
Major Hibbert and I shared a primitive rod I had brought back from Stamboul. I was allowed to go fishing once by mistake. Postas shikared me so severely that I had little fishing, but my brother officers were most sporting and kind in not minding a little inconvenience. They, too, however, went not to fish so much as to get a walk three miles outside the limits tramped over for so long.
We went to see the football twice a week, and on these occasions General Delamain and I sometimes exchanged political notes on Europe. The third offensive had begun, but changed immediately into a counter-offensive. I shared a room with a Major Julius, a staff officer of considerable reputation in India. It is significant that from some meagre news of cavalry and artillery movement on the French front, he calmly and deliberately prophesied that the great day had come, and an offensive would follow. It did. In a few days we had got Peronne, and went on and on.
Colonel Newcombe arrived two weeks after me, and now came to my house. We worked letters to Stamboul, and I kept privately in touch with de Nari. This was expensive, as we paid a person's passage weekly, there and back, with a reward. The colonel now proceeded to lose his heart to the young lady who had nursed him in hospital.
Communication to Stamboul from Brusa remained difficult, owing to the risk. Forkheimer had kindly written a note to the Consul at Brusa, and through this channel I managed, once or twice, to get communication through to de Nari about money and news, although I did not send any intelligence matter through this channel, as being unfair to the other side; and in fact I promised to that effect. The Consul's daughters were most sporting and kind. We met them, on occasion, in the bazaar, and Greenwood, who had now turned up at Brusa, and who had made much progress as a disciple, frequently did sleight of hand tricks over a basket of apples in some one's stall with one of them, thus getting a note through about Embassy money or something. I managed to get letters through to Forkheimer to recover for me a medical certificate which Dr. König had formerly written me, but which had gone astray, except one piece perfectly undecipherable.
A Committee of Prisoners' Exchange now arrived, and we all fortified ourselves with statements of our cases. I knew they would prevent my going for political reasons, unless and until de Nari's schemes were ready.
More and more I saw only too clearly how all other schemes and policies came back to the U. & P.'s programme. That notorious party, bad as it was, remained the one strong faction with anything like a programme or that knew what it wanted. It retained the reins of government merely because everything outside it was vacillating, indefinite, inarticulate; because the policy of parties that revolved around it was either tyrannized by intrigue or hampered by personal jealousies. And so these parties made no progress towards translating their general ideals into realities, but vaporized over their respective watchwords. For instance, the Itihad or Union faction was for bridging the artificial distinction of Young and Old Turk. They wanted a Turkey for all Turks. Another faction, rather a lesser circle enclosed by the last, was the Peace and Salvation Society which was for immediate cessation of hostilities, abandoning the scimitar for the wheels of industry and general social development. These dreamed of the Prince Subaheddine and wanted his recall. The Prince had had to leave Turkey at the peril of his life, and after doing useful work for us in Greece went to Switzerland. He seems an idealist of good intentions, and with a love of his country, but, unless under the shelter of our guns, to lack both the vigour, nerve and determination necessary to cope with such as Enver a soldier of fortune, Telaat a promoted telegraph clerk, Djemal a throwback to the primitive Tartar, all enjoying a snatched executive authority at the point of a revolver. There had been with me in the prison in Stamboul a Turkish major brought up for appropriating goods. From him I learned something of the appalling nature of the corruption in Turkey. Take Giahid Bey, for example, who was appointed to stop profiteering. He merely steered profits into his own pocket and that of Enver & Co. I heard from a first-hand source that on the second sack of Erzerum, property worth three million liras was divided between the triumvirate and remains invested in various countries against an international finance débacle later on.
Take Jemal, the Governor of Stamboul (Commandant de la Place), formerly Enver's A.D.C., a man in whose hands rested the lives of practically all the political prisoners of Turkey. Not one spark of justice remains to such. Not only had he to fulfil the mandates of the triumvirate, but, outside that, he utilized every opportunity for his own advancement. That is possible in Stamboul probably more than anywhere in Europe, not even excepting Russia. To seek advancement at the expense of the public weal and justice, it is only necessary to enter the arena of intrigue boldly, and, armed with the possession of as many facts as possible of other intrigues, by a general compromise of blackmail, to retain this advancement. Added to which there is the difficulty of foreign policy, left as a most tangled legacy of personal intrigue by Abdul Hamid. The problem of Russia, Turkey's external fear both for Constantinople and her eastern flank, of the Balkans with their vulture propensities awaiting the fall of Turkey, and the necessity of Turkey having at least one friend in Europe, are a sufficient handful without the increased embarrassment she gets from internal questions like that of the Armenians and the Arabs. And over all these problems, without and within, mined like high explosives around every important structure of the State, there is usually flung the shadow of some daring ambassador presiding by intrigue and threat of application of the match. Wangenheim was such a one.
One heard it said on every hand that our ambassadorial representation before the war was so weak that it flung Turkey into the arms of Germany. There must be some truth in this from the universality of its utterance, and yet imagine to what state a country, as seething with intrigue and corruption as is Turkey, must be reduced by being bombarded with the courtship of the leading Powers?
The third German offensive now became our offensive, and once more the tide of battle ended in our favour. Once more on the French front we redug our trenches among the earlier dead. We seemed still far from getting back to England. The exchange that should have happened two years before has been held up partly by the instigation of Germany, and partly by the weakness of our own delegates on the Prisoner of War Committee in Switzerland, two or three years before. Eighteen months after Turkish prisoners in Egypt had got their treatment agreed upon, we were left in statu quo, and when we saw for the first time the regulations to which both England and Turkey were bound, there were outbursts of indignation on every hand. If our representatives on the Prisoner of War Committee had included some efficient soldier, who had known, by practical dealings, the methods and delays and subterfuges of the Turks, we would have had some safeguards, and it would not have been possible to keep British officers in underground typhus cells for nine months, awaiting trial for an offence of escaping, the penalty of which was only two weeks, and the inspection of camps would not have been a farce. For instance, a list was allowed to be presented by the Turks saying all camps had no complaints, when we had not even been visited up to date (July, 1918).